Bankers high on cocaine, a drug that enhances self-confidence and gives a feeling of irrational exuberance, caused the credit crisis in the U.S., the main trigger of the global financial and economic crisis, says former British government drugs czar David Nutt, quoted by The Guardian.
“Wall Street got drunk,” said in 2008 former U.S. President George W. Bush at the emergence of sub-prime credit crisis in the U.S. Two years later, Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, said in a speech that “the role of a central bank in monetary policy is to take the punch bowl away just as the party gets going.”
But perhaps not the alcohol is to blame for the crisis. Psychiatrist David Nutt, an expert in narcotics and their effect on the human mind, said for the Sunday Times that “Bankers use cocaine and got us into this terrible mess. It is a ‘more’ drug.” He added that the cocaine is part of their “culture of excitement and drive and more and more and more.”
Cocaine use produces users an irrational exuberance with a tendency to speak very convincingly about something they don’t known. Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan described the credit bubble as a result of “irrational exuberance.”
Dealers can be more persuasive when selling “absurd financial weapons of mass destruction” after taking a drug that increases self-confidence such as cocaine. Also, only investors high on cocaine would buy mortgage-backed securities worth billions of dollars when it is obvious that a housing bubble is imminent.
The office of Bernard Lawrence “Bernie” Madoff was called the “North Pole” because of the large amount of “snow” found there. Madoff, a former chairman of the Nasdaq stock market, is the operator of a Ponzi Scheme, the biggest financial fraud in U.S. history. Most bankers can tell that Jimmy Cayne, former CEO of Bear Stearns, had a bottle labeled “anti-acid medication”, but full of cocaine.
Dr Chris Luke of Cork University Hospital, Ireland, who has studied the effects of cocaine on bankers said that “prominent figures in financial and political circles made irrational decisions as a result of megalomania brought on by cocaine usage.”
He concluded: “people were making insane decisions and thinking they were 110% right… which led to the current chaos.”
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